The air we breathe contains various different kinds of mold spores. Unfortunately, many people are allergic to one or more of these mold spores.
In the treatment of mold spore allergy, an extract is prepared from the mold to which the patient exhibits allergic tendencies. This extract is injected into the patient at intervals, with the dosage being progressively increased over a period of time. The same, or a similar extract, can be used for the standard skin test to determine a patient's allergic tendencies with respect to a particular mold.
Unfortunately, even after three or four years of injection treatment, it is rare to observe any reduction in skin test reactivity to mold extracts. Immunotherapy with pollen and bee venom, by contrast, will generally result in reduction of symptoms on re-exposure to the antigen, a decrease in skin test reactivity and/or changes in other in vitro tests.
A primary problem with prior art mold extracts is that they are made from mold spore material which is not believed to have adequate concentrations of spore material. It is also believed that the composition and purity of a given mold extract is not constant from batch to batch. These factors materially reduce the effectiveness of the usual injection treatment for inhalant mold allergy.
Molds of the type relevant to inhalant mold allergy comprise mold spores and mycelia. The mold spore is the material to which patients are commonly allergic, and the mycelia is the growing structure for the mold spores. Mold spores are somewhat analogous to the fruit of a tree, and mycelia is analogous to the branches and root structure.
Because only the mold spore is the allergen, in preparing mold spore material from which a mold extract is to be made, it is first necessary to separate the mold spores from the mycelia. This is roughly analogous to harvesting the leaves on a tree by severing the fruit from the branches of the tree. However, the job of mold-spore harvesting is inifinitely more difficult than leaf harvesting because the mold spores are of microscopic size and cannot be hand picked as in the case of the usual agricultural harvesting methods.
Various methods are known for obtaining a mold spore material for use in making a mold extract. For example, mold spores can be seeded onto a solid medium, allowed to grow and then brushed from the medium. Also, mold spores can be grown on cellophane which is placed on the surface of a growth-supporting medium. After a sufficient growth has been attained, the cellophane is folded together, lifted from the medium, dried with moderate heat and then subjected to the usual extracting methods. None of these prior art methods provides an extract of the desired purity nor an extract of adequately repeatable composition.